The invention relates to DNA amplification and analysis.
A variety of DNA amplification methods have been previously reported that deal with sequence analysis of an uncharacterized region adjacent to a known element. Those methods include inverse PCR (iPCR) [Ochman et. al., Genetics 120:621-623 (1988); Triglia et. al., Nucleic Acids Res. 16:8186 (1988)], panhandle PCR [Jones and Winistorfer, Nucleic Acids Res. 20:595-600 (1992); Jones and Winistorfer, Biotechniques 23:132-138 (1997)], cassette ligation-anchored PCR [Mueller and Wold, Science 246:780-786 (1989)], vectorette-PCR [Riley et. al., Nucleic Acids Res. 18:2887-2890 (1990)], novel-Alu-PCR [Puskas et. al., Nucleic Acids Res. 22:3251-3252 (1994)] and Thermal Asymmetric Interlaced PCR (TAIL-PCR) [Liu and Whittier, Genomics 25:673-681 (1995)]. Despite various degrees of success, a number of drawbacks reduce the accuracy and efficiency of each of these methods.